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Extinct Ibex Resurrected By Cloning
The Telegraph is reporting that for the first time an extinct animal has been brought back via cloning. The Pyrenean ibex, a type of mountain goat, was declared officially extinct in 2000, but thanks to preserved skin samples scientists were able to insert that DNA into eggs from domestic goats to clone a female Pyrenean ibex. While the goat didn't survive long due to lung defects this gives scientists hopes that it will be possible to resurrect extinct species from frozen tissue. "Using techniques similar to those used to clone Dolly the sheep, known as nuclear transfer, the researchers were able to transplant DNA from the tissue into eggs taken from domestic goats to create 439 embryos, of which 57 were implanted into surrogate females. Just seven of the embryos resulted in pregnancies and only one of the goats finally gave birth to a female bucardo, which died seven minutes later due to breathing difficulties, perhaps due to flaws in the DNA used to create the clone."
"one of the goats finally gave birth to a female burrito"?
'cause I sure did.
I'll bet the good people at The Telegraph are wondering how a story published on 31 Jan 2009 made it back into the most viewed list.
Don't you see? It's a marketing ploy by Apple!
-- I really need to bleed off some of this
Aye, actually when I read the heading I felt some kind of a déjà vu... no wonder.
Well maybe not. As long as we're pouring on the Jurassic Park references, there was another line "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."
The animal has been extinct for a short time, but none-the-less the norm in northern Spain for the last 9 years has been to not have ibex. Reintroducing cloned ibex to the area might cause other issues that hadn't been considered.
Paul Lenhart writes words!
There are many species without a Y chromosome. Guppies (the aquarium fish) for example. The diff between female and male guppies is X X vs. X null.
Humans are headed in this direction, slowly, because the human Y chromosome is non-recombinant and does not repair itself when errors or mutations occur. Whether that means males are defective or just more efficient is still up for debate.
My office has been taken over by iPod people.
Goat gestation period are around 150 days.
Ibex is around 165 days.
Even if you take a healthy Ibex mother and remove the fetus after 150 days, it will have similar lung disability. Lungs being the last thing to develop in a fetus, if you chop off the last few days of fetal development, you're sacrificing lung function. They won't work at 100%, and they'll be way more sensitive to any agitation. It seems to me like a better approach would be to find an animal with a equal OR LONGER gestational period. I don't mean for Ibexes in particular; it just makes sense for any mammal. Try a mountain goat: 180 day average gestation period. Just make sure you bust the little guy out two weeks early.
If humans go extinct and you implant human DNA into a bonobo, you're putting something that takes 280 days to cook into an oven with a 230 day timer. No, it won't be fully cooked when the thing dings - the lungs especially. Premature human babies do survive that young, but we've had a long time and lots of money poured into finding ways to make that happen.